For 14 years, Carlo Briscoe and Edward Dunn have lived and worked in a redundant 1920s butter factory in mid-Wales. In their evolving and expanding home they have brought up their children Charlie, aged 18, and Lily, 12, while running Reptile, a handmade and hand-painted tiles and ceramics business.

The style and decoration of the house is influenced by Briscoe and Dunn’s love of colour, the ceramics they make and the driftwood and objects that the family collects from the nearby beaches. But the buildings themselves have, over the years, been adapted and updated to accommodate the family and its needs – more room for teenage children and separate live-and-work space for the adults.

“The conservatory at the back of the house was a lean-to shed, and the hole where the motor for operating the butter churn used to be is patched up but still visible,” says Briscoe. At one stage, the long ground-floor sitting room was the couple’s workshop, and the guest bedroom on the upper floor was the sitting room until the workshop was moved to a new, light studio built on the footprint of the original garage.

At the top of the dog-leg staircase, which was moved from the end of the sitting room to the centre, there are four bedrooms and a blue, tongue-and-groove-panelled landing. The small guest bedroom has a raised, bunk-like bed with storage underneath. The striped curtain that conceals the storage, and the matching curtain at the window, are in a deckchair stripe fabric from Ikea. In Briscoe and Dunn’s bedroom, the curtains and gathered panel disguising the radiator are made from lengths of vivid pink, sequined sari cloth, which complement the bubblegum pink of the paintwork.

The kitchen was a later addition to the side of the main house, but is joined to the sitting room by an archway knocked through the thick outside wall, and because of its unstable construction the extension had to be gutted and underpinned before the current kitchen was installed.

This galley-style room is now predominately blue, with the cavernous recess around the Aga lined with Gaudi-esque decoration made from shards of domestic pottery found in the local river and on the seashore. A wall-mounted plate rack holds the family’s tableware, and underneath is a panel of sea urchin-themed tiles, made by Dunn and painted by Briscoe.

The conservatory, which runs across the back of the house, has a seashore theme and much of its flotsam and jetsam decoration has been collected on family beachcombing expeditions to Freshwater West, Marloes Beach and Amroth. Faded floats, lengths of fishing net and buoys are interspersed with driftwood planes and boats fashioned from weather-beaten wood by Dunn. “It’s amazing what we’ve carted back,” he says, admitting that they once broke the car’s axle with a large and extra-heavy find.

Plaques of painted ceramics also adorn the long internal wall of the conservatory, while the many-windowed outer wall looks out over the rabbit run and chicken coop, green-wooded hillsides and the banks of the local river. The floors throughout the ground floor are covered with Spanish terracotta tiles, interspersed with border and interconnecting diamond tiles made by Briscoe and Dunn. Dunn also carved the fish design on the wood panel at the front of his “pub” bar in the conservatory. He made the conservatory table from found wood, too, and the kitchen table from trees blown down in the grounds of Osterley Park in Middlesex.

The long sitting room was opened up when the workshop moved to the garage site and the staircase was relocated. At the same time a log-burning stove was installed to heat the room. The walls of the recess in which the stove sits are covered with Delft-like tiles. But look closely and you will see that the distinctive blue and white squares don’t portray the usual scenes and figures of genuine Delft tiles; instead they depict Briscoe and Dunn’s domestic life, local birds and wildlife, their dog and other whimsical details.

“We are often commissioned to create one-off tiles for kitchens, bathrooms and utility rooms,” says Briscoe. “A family whose surname is Bacon asked us to do a series featuring pictures of rashers of bacon and eggs, and we also did a panel for Waitrose in the Kings Road portraying the history of Chelsea and some of the local characters.”

The main bathroom is also a venue for colourful tiles and driftwood. The mirror above the basin is framed with a “Yellow submarine” painted border, the bath panel has a merry collection of three-dimensional fish, and the walk-in shower is clad in scenic tiles. The linen cupboard and the cabinet above the towel rail are made from recycled wood and driftwood gleaned during shoreline walks.

The final part of the Briscoe-Dunn enclave is their studio, which can be reached through a door at the far end of the sitting room, or by a front door on the other side of the courtyard garden. Perhaps it is because they don’t have to travel far to get to the studio that they need their frequent collecting trips to the beach, the source of so much inspiration and material for their work.

For further information, visit www.reptiletiles.co.uk. The company is showing its work in the second week of Origin: The London Craft Fair, at Somerset House, London WC2. Origin runs from October 2-14 (www.craftscouncil.org.uk/origin; 020-7278 7700)

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